"Trash TV Trance" sounds like it's going to be something from the gritty, rock and roll-based stream of programming that's a part of what goes on at EMPAC. But it will actually be a chamber music concert happening there Saturday night with the young Manhattan-based Talea Ensemble.

This won't be your typical classical music evening, though, that's for sure.

The program features music by the late Italian composer Fausto Romitelli, who died in 2004 at age 41. Romitelli's music, according to Talea Ensemble percussionist Alex Lipowski, mixes the sound worlds of acid rock and French experimentalism.

"He wants you to experience a sensory overload," Lipowski says. "It's often thick and dirty, really raw, like psychedelic rock would be. But you can actually look into the sound for all these different colors. It's not inaccessible by any means, but colorful like Debussy and sensual like anything French."

Romitelli spent most of his professional career in Paris, working at IRCAM, the center for experimental music and sound research founded by Pierre Boulez. He's thus associated with the French school of "spectral music" — composition based on the acoustical phenomenon of the overtone series.

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But some of the titles in his catalogue of roughly three dozen works show his allegiance to a less refined realm of creativity. "Trash TV Trance," for example, is for solo electric guitar with feedback.

Saturday's concert also features "Blood on the Floor" and "Amok Koma," the largest piece on the program, scored for eight players plus electronics and surround sound. All six works performed by Talea will be recorded with EMPAC engineers for a release in the summer on Tzadik.

That label, by the way, is curated and run by John Zorn, the composer and saxophonist who will be appearing in an April 3 solo concert — already sold out — also at EMPAC. Talea performed a concert of Zorn's music at Columbia University's Miller Theater in November.

Bringing Romitelli's music to American audiences fits in with the mission of the Talea Ensemble, which was founded in 2007.

"We're trying to do diverse but forward-looking programs," says Lipowski, 26. "If we're playing standards of new music, then it's from a new perspective, in a light where it's not been heard. Now we have the opportunity to bring composers from Europe to the U.S., and we've begun getting attention from European programmers as well."

Talea has just been booked to appear at Germany's prestigious Darmstadt festival of experimental music in July. That's in addition to a current season of concerts in Manhattan and additional residencies this spring at Ithaca College and Stanford University.

"The ensemble prides itself on representing composers really championed in Europe and bringing their voice to the United States," continues Lipowski.

None of the members of Talea actually knew Romitelli. A recording of his magnum opus — with the distinctive title "Professor Bad Trip" — caught the attention of Talea's artistic director, Anthony Cheung, a few years ago.

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"Anthony just decided it was something we had to do and we got our hands on more and more of his music," Lipowski says. "You can lose yourself in the music, because it's transcendental. So get ready for the Romitelli experience. Like the Jimi Hendrix experience, it will be radical and experimental and hopefully transformative."